The Magic Circle by Katherine Neville (top 10 books of all time txt) 📕

The summer of 1870, when Hieronymus was ten years old and his baby sister had just turned two, Clio’s father died, and his rich trove of manuscripts and objects came into her possession. Her father sensibly left the money in trust, for the sole use of Clio and her descendants—and a private message to be opened only by her. Based on her father’s last letter, Clio planned an extended trek with the Gypsies across the Swiss border into Italy, leaving the children behind with their father. But this time Erasmus insisted upon accompanying her. He’d begun to suspect his young wife of holding back much she’d discovered—and he thought he might know why.

Then Clio simply disappeared one night with the Gypsies, leaving a note that she would be back by summer’s end. But that was never to be. From that point onward, event swiftly followed event almost as if directed by an unseen hand.

On July 19, 1870, the Franco-Prussian War broke out, and pandemonium ensued. The utopian commune swiftly dissolved, its outside funds cut off by the war. Erasmus Behn—with two children on his hands, a missing wife, and dwindling fortunes—knew he must hasten home to try to secure those of Clio’s documents and artifacts still in his possession, should Holland be overrun.

Erasmus was wounded while crossing the battle zone between Switzerland and Belgium. He barely managed to enter Holland with the children before he died. His little remaining money was used by the local church to provide for his son’s education. His daughter with Clio was sent away to a foundling home. To be separated by war seems the endless fate of our family, as for so many others. In this case, however, it will never be clear whether Clio’s permanent separation from Erasmus was accidental or planned. Had war not intervened, would she have returned?

Eight years after Erasmus Behn’s death, his son Hieronymus completed his education and entered training for the only profession, except the army, available to a boy with limited resources: the Calvinist ministry. His preparation served only to strengthen beliefs already well ingrained through ten years of living with his father. Indeed, the ideas inculcated in him by the church became his first passion.

Hieronymus Behn had come to resent his stepmother Clio bitterly. He irrationally saw her as having robbed him and his father of everything for which, in the Calvinist sense, they’d been “chosen.” She’d abandoned his father in wartime, going off with the Gypsies and stealing everything the family owned of value. In the darkness of his heart, Hieronymus suspected her of far worse, for who knew what the unbridled passions of a woman like that might have led her to? If only his father had gained the upper hand with this woman, his wife, as had surely been his right in the eyes of God, and under the law! Everything Clio owned, even before her marriage to his father, Hieronymus believed, should by rights now belong to him.

Instead, it was because of his stepmother Clio, Hieronymus reasoned, that he’d wound up receiving nothing better than a pauper’s education. He really cared nothing about his young half sister, who’d been sent off God knew where. After all, she was partly of Clio’s blood. It was his inheritance he wanted. He’d perused his father’s papers, kept for him by the church. He now had an excellent idea of the nature and value of those artifacts and documents his stepmother had hoarded and refused to let his father see or sell. They’d be worth far more today, when the value of such things was better understood. He resolved that one day he would find his stepmother and get his birthright back. This day of reckoning might be years in coming—but come, at last, it would.

In the year 1899 festivities were under way in countries throughout Europe, prematurely celebrating the dawn of the last century of our millennium, which didn’t legitimately take place until 1901. The Schönbrunn Palace in Vienna was illuminated for the first time by electric lights; Ferris wheels blossomed on the riverbanks of many cities; modern scientific technology flourished everywhere.

None of these new inventions, however, was so widely heralded both by the press and by popular opinion as a single ancient discovery. On Christmas Day of 1899, as workmen were repairing a water pipe deep in the foundations of the castle overlooking the town of Salzburg, they uncovered a large golden platter that was believed to predate, by one thousand years, the time of Christ.

Experts were called in, and various theories as to the platter’s origins were given. Some believed it came from the first Temple of Solomon, others that it had been among the objects melted down to create the Golden Calf, then later restored to its original form. Some claimed the design was Greek, others Macedonian or Phrygian. Since these cultures had traded with one another over thousands of years, the only consensus was that the platter was ancient, and of Eastern origin. It was to be put on public display at the Hohensalzburg castle throughout the month of January 1900 before being carried off to the royal treasury house at Vienna.

Hieronymus Behn, now nearly forty, had spent the past twenty years seeking the woman who’d stolen his inheritance and blighted his very existence. But the moment he saw reports in the Dutch press describing the Salzburg platter, he was sure he knew how to find her. One of the few rare scrolls his father had managed to appropriate from Clio was still in Hieronymus’s possession, along with the only copy of the extensive research Clio herself had done on the document. If he wasn’t mistaken, this scroll pertained directly to the recently surfaced Salzburg platter.

He took the train from Amsterdam to Salzburg, arriving a day before the exhibition was to open. He went on foot from the station to the castle, and contacted the curator at once. It wasn’t the platter he was interested in, but he did